Are you compelled to finish a book?

If you start a book - do you always finish it? Even if it bores you? Do you read more than one book at a time?

I am "almost" finished with Nickel and Dimed...I was really interested in the author's experiences working low pay jobs. The last chapter, she evaluated her experience. It was snooze time for me! I already read her experience...I guess I wanted to come to my own evaluation - not hers.

Anyway, I have this OCD about finishing a book that I start. Those books that never quite "catch" your interest in the beginning? I always plow through it (sometimes very slowly)...and I finish the book. I feel like I might be missing something critical if I don't finish reading the entire thing.

I also only read one book at a time (except self-help/educational books). I feel like a book somehow deserves my full attention...so it's one book at a time for me.

I'm off to peek at my next book...but I can't start reading it because there is that last evaluation chapter of Nickel and Dimed nagging at me. I don't want to read it...but I will. I'm so weird.

I've only not finished a book twice in my life. Once because I left it on an airplane - and I almost bought it again just to finish it, even though it wasn't even that good. And the other time, I just really had to put it down, it sucked so bad.

I'll struggle to finish probably 99% of the books that I pick up to read. There's very few times I won't finish something, and normally in that case I honestly didn't really even start it anyways...maybe got 30-50 pages into it and decided it just wasn't for me.

Even if I'm not enjoying a book, I generally feel obligated to at least skim through until the end. I don't know if it's just because I am a completist, if it's because I'm ever-optimistic things might pick up by the end, if I feel I owe the author my attention for all the time he/she spent writing the thing, or if it just distresses me to waste my hard-earned money. I am the same with movie rentals, even if it's clear that the thing is utter dreck, I always feel like, well, "I already paid for it, might as well see it through."

Unlike KaiCee, I am not a biblio-monogamist. I'm always in the middle of at least three books at one time, to suit whatever my caprices might be at the moment, so let's say maybe one fiction, one non-fiction, one graphic novel or humor, something like that (of course, if I'm really enthralled in one of them, I'll read it all through in one shot). It doesn't bother me to be in the middle of different books at once, because I like having relief from something really heavy, or if I am in the middle of a very lengthy book, I don't want to have to put off something else I'd like to read just because I have to finish another. Call me a literary slut, if you like, but hey that's just the way I like it.

All my life, I have felt destiny tugging at my sleeve.~ Thursday NextI don't want to "go with the flow". The flow just washes you down the drain. I want to fight the flow.- Henry RollinsAll this spiritual talk is great and everything...but at the end of the day, there's nothing like a pair of skinny jeans. - Jillian Michaels